High School Biology-Chemistry SMILE Meeting
10 May 2005
Notes Prepared by Porter Johnson

Barbara Lorde [Attucks
School]
Dancing Spaghetti
The presentation is based upon the web page Dancing Spaghetti: http://www.easyfunschool.com/article1061.html
on the website of the NSF Science & Technology Center for
Environmentally Responsible Solvents
and Processes [CERSP], which she passed around the room. Basically,
the
addition of vinegar to baking soda (the classic
elementary school chemical
reaction)
produces bubbles of carbon dioxide. When small pieces of
spaghetti are
mixed with baking soda, and vinegar is then added,
the spaghetti
pieces begin to
dance. This "dancing spaghetti" is a visual assay of the
chemical reaction:

NaHCO3 + CH3COOH ®
CH3COONa
+ CO2 + H2O

The bubbling of the mixture, and
dancing of the spaghetti, signals the production and release of CO2gas during the reaction.

Then Barbara described discussions with her students about
careers that
require the study of science in school. For example, chemistry
is
directly relevant to careers in medicine, pharmacy, research,
forensics, cooking, the food industry, hazardous material removal,
and many others.

Barbara also showed us how to make fingerprints by shading a small
piece of paper with a soft pencil, then putting the finger tip in the
shaded area to pick up the pencil mark, and then transferring it (as a
fingerprint) to a piece of clear tape (which can then be taped to a
second piece of paper, producing a permanent preparation of the
fingerprint). Barbara does a similar exercise with lip prints
using lipstick as the "color" to transfer the print to a piece of paper
(to produce a permanent record). Details appear in the attached sheets
(from http://www.chem4kids.com
for the fingerprints and
http://www.lawrencehallofscience.org
for the lip prints).

Good ideas! Thanks, Barbara.

Ed Scanlon [Morgan Park HS,
biology]
Predicting the weather
Ed shared the following lesson with us. He had drawn three
consecutive daily weather maps of the USA, copied from those
appearing in
newspapers. Ed then had his students determine the pattern
(ie, direction) of movement of the high and low pressure centers, the
warm and cold fronts, and the temperatures over the three-day period,
and then predict on a blank map representing the fourth day, where the
highs and lows, and warm and cold fronts would appear. He also had the
students predict the temperatures in various parts of the country on
day four, extrapolating from
the first three days. He did the same for precipitation, and
whether the precipitation would be rain or snow. Ed then asked
the students to explain how they had reached their conclusions.This exercise is very simple, but quite interesting and profound!
Thanks, Ed.

Terri Donatello [ST Edwards
School]
More on map reading
Terri showed how contour maps can be used to work on math and
graphing skills, using the elevation numbers on the contours to plot a
graph of elevation versus linear distance to get another view of what
terrain with elevation changes looks like. Terri also
brought some stereo contour maps that could be seen in three dimensions
using a stereo viewer.